In fact — according to a photo which has gone viral on social media in China — it’s a place where devs can pay for their apps’ download numbers to be artificially inflated. Why would anyone want to do this? Simply put: because more downloads (perhaps accompanied by positive reviews) enhances apps’ chart position, thereby raising their discoverability level, and hopefully prompting people to download them. The photo in question appears to show a worker at one such place, sitting in front of what look like around 100 iPhone 5c units.

Pirate Box. What Google Knows About You. When you use Google, you are making a deal.

You get to use Gmail and search and YouTube and Google Maps for free and in exchange, you agree to share information about yourself. Google gets to sell that information to advertisers. The more Google knows about you, the more it can match you to an advertiser who thinks you are an ideal customer. Advertisers are willing to pay more for ads served to ideal potential customers. For instance, airlines want to target people who love to travel. Google uses a lot of methods to learn about you. By visiting a site called "Ads Settings" you can see what Google knows about you. It's not that easy to find Ads Settings. Then click on "Account history".

Remembering Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood Star Who Helped Make Wi-Fi. Brief history of programming languages. I was having lunch with a friend, and he asked me a question I should know the answer to, and only knew partially: what’s the history of modern programming languages?

How did we get here? I told him about machine language, how people wanted to make it easier and came up with progressively more abstract languages that are still then eventually translated into 0s and 1s. But—by chance I was watching Crockford on JavaScript, and he started with telling the actual story—although focusing on JavaScript and the languages it was influenced by—and it’s way more interesting. Punched cards Everything started with punched cards—which are simple pieces of paper with holes in them (pictures down below). Invention. Enter The Binary Worlds of Anonymous Generative Coder LoremIpsum-404. One of the many splendid things about digital art is the role anonymity can play in its transmission.

The idea that the artist could be just about anyone is often just as thrilling as the work itself. This is the very antithesis of the art world conceit that artists are brands, and that works are just parts of a collector's investment portfolio. Dextro, one of the pioneers of Internet and generative art, has been anonymous since the mid-'90s, and it's not as if it's hurt him. The aptly-named French artist LoremIpsum-404 seems to be deftly following in Dextro's footsteps, staking out digital vistas with code-based art.

In our email correspondence, LoremIpsum-404 seems to have a real name, Flo Arrieu, but this could be a bit of clever misdirection. “Online, we are a heterogeneous continuous flow of permanent production,” LoremIpsum-404 told The Creators Project.
Données. Preliminary declaration of the digital human rights. Apple and Facebook just got darker: freezing female employees' eggs is anything but kind. Now, two of the American tech giants, Apple and Facebook, are pushing the boundaries of company culture once again: they will pay for female employees to freeze their eggs.

There won’t be facilities on site in offices, well not yet. No, these corporate behemoths are willing to put up £12,000 towards the cost of the whole experience in order to allow women to focus on their careers. A shot from Emma's tour around the former Facebook HQ in 2011 A lot will be written and said in the next 24 hours as people get their heads around this bold move. Because bold it is. But I’m not going to advance those positions in this article because, while I applaud innovation – and this is arguably one of the most brilliant interventions into levelling the gender playing field at work – I think this policy smacks of something far more sinister.

Patch n°11 / Mars 2010 by Le manège.mons/CECN. Emmanuel Mahe les pratiqueurs. Après le livre. Data Is Beautiful is a hidden gem for gorgeous data visualizations. Data visualization is one of the most delightful trends in media. It’s perfect for skimming and can turn a boring economic analysis into a work of art. Many practitioners are looking for inspiration in this quickly evolving field. A (relatively) new Reddit, DataIsBeautiful, aims to collect the best of the Web in a daily rounded up of gorgeous data visualizations. Lately, this Reddit community has really picked up steam and is unearthing the best ways to visualization thought-provoking and topical stories. History This smoke trail of ship-log entries from the 18th and 19th century is a wonderful retelling of history through exploration.